New Work by
Marvin Bell
Stephen Kuusisto
Bill Schulz
Thomasina DeMaio
And Many More...

NINE MILE MAGAZINE
Publisher: Bob Herz
Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto
Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels
Cover Art: Thomasina DeMaio, Lawrence F. 1981.
oil on canvas 36 by 28 inches
Used by permission of the artist
Nine Mile Magazine is a publication of Nine Mile Artcorp
Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors
and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may
be reproduced in full or in part without prior written
permission from its owner.

About Nine Mile Magazine
Nine Mile Magazine is an online magazine of literature and
art, digitally published in Spring and Fall of each year. It was
founded in 2013 by Bob Herz and Whitney Daniels, who
remains art editor emeritus, and to whom we remain grateful
for the design of the magazine. The magazine is edited by
Bob Herz and, with this issue, also by extraordinary poet and
writer Stephen Kuusisto.
Our purpose in creating this magazine is simple: to publish
the best writing and artwork available to us, with an emphasis
on Central New York, where we live and which is undergoing
tremendous ferment in poetry, art, music, and literature. Like
the 25-mile long Nine Mile Creek from which we take our
name, the magazine follows a varied course, with different
writings and arts coming together to form a cohesive whole.
Our views are broad and eclectic, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re excited to be able
to provide publication and appreciation to our fellow creative
types.
Nine Mile is a labor of love. It is not supported by financial
individuals or institutions other than ourselves. We regret
that we are unable to offer compensation to artists and
authors other than publication in a quality collection, in the
company of others who share a dedication to their art.
We hope you enjoy this and all our prior issues, which are
available online. If you have time and inclination, please drop
us a line and let us know what you think.
â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto, Editors

Page 4 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

About Talk About Poetry
Talk About Poetry is the podcast venture of Nine Mile
Magazine, a discussion with working poets about poems that
interest, annoy, excite, or otherwise engage us. Participants
in the discussion are working poets and writers. All podcasts
are available on Soundcloud and on iTunes, and the Talk
About Poetry blog provides an extended discussion of the
poems and an opportunity for listener feedback. The
addresses are:
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-aboutpoetry/id972411979?mt=2
Wordpress blog: https://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com
Discussions & readings to date (Fall , 2015) have been:
Robert Bly’s “Old Boards”
Marvin Bell’s “About the Dead Man and Your Hands”
Brigit Kelley’s “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone”
Phil Memmer’s “How Many Shapes Must A God Take” and
“Psalm”
Georgia Popoff’s “The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food
Chain” and “Name Inconsequential”
Stephen Kuusisto’s “Sand” and “They Say”
Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Voetex Sutra” (2 parts)
Discusson of Georgia Popoff’s Psalter
Discussion of Jasmine Bailey’s Alexandria
Discussion of Marvin Bell’s poems, and a specific focus on his
Dead Man poems (2 parts)
Readings by Ken Weisner, Jasmine Bailey, Georgia Popoff,
Andrea Scarpino, Sam Pereira, Marvin Bell
Links at the discussions provide texts of poems under
discussion.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 5

Our Submission Policy
We want to see your best work! Submit via email to:
info@ninemile.org.
â&#x20AC;˘ Poetry: submit 4 - 6 poems in word, text, or pdf format.
â&#x20AC;˘ Artwork: submit 3 - 5 small jpg files.
Include your name and contact information along with
1. a brief paragraph about yourself (background, education,
achievements, etc),
2. a statement of aesthetic intent for these poems or
artwork, and
3. a photo of yourself, and a link to your website (if
available).
We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us,
reconnect to make sure we received your submission.
Note that at least for now we do not accept essays, reviews,
video / motion based art, or Q&A's without invitation.

Page 6 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Marvin Bell
The Book of the Dead Man
(The Batting Cage)
Live as if you were already dead. -- Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and the Batting Cage
You know what's coming, and you still can't hit it.
The dead man set the speed at high, the pitcher was not permitted
bean balls or the inside corner of the plate.
It was not as it was for the little, lead-off hitter taking one for the
team, not like that.
The batting cage is a form, a shape, a definition, a physical
tautology, an insular life of now, and again now, and now
yet again.
Snapping overhand, the robotic arm brings it.
You are in the cage to hit line drives, a little arc is best, a liner to
the outfield will be the top prize.
The mesh ceiling blocks high flies, a grounder is humiliating.
A batter wants to know his next swing will bring rain.
Bring your bat, the cage bats feel water-logged.
The dead man, a singles hitter, chokes up, he just wants to reach
base.

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2. More About the Dead Man and
the Batting Cage
The dead man, battling a robot hurler, did not wear a helmet.
Even if the arc of its slingshot delivery could go awry, look out.
If only the dead man could predict when a pitch will be a brushback, can you?
The runner on first wants to go, does one have to swing?
Imagine, instead, that the strike zone fits you.
You can wait out the wide heat, pay for the plate.
The old batting cages befitted the grit of single-A.
No uniforms, batting gloves, cocky dances or the dreams of
parents.
It wasn't when they brought in the fences, juiced the bats and
balls, and gave up on "get 'em on, get 'em over, get 'em
in."
It was when they called the hot dogs "gourmet."

Page 8 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

About Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell is author of more than 23 books of poetry, including The
Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), Ardor: The Book
of the Dead Man, Vol. 2 (Copper Canyon
Press, 1997), Nightworks: Poems
1962-2000 (Copper Canyon Press,
2000), Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon
Press, 2007), and Vertigo: The Living
Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon
Press, 2011).
Bell's first major work, A Probable
Volume of Dreams, won the Lamont
Poetry Prize in 1969, and he has since
won many other honors, including
Guggenheim and National Endowment
for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, and Senior Fulbrights to Yugoslavia and
Australia. In 2000 Bell was appointed the first Poet Laureate for the
state of Iowa.
Bell taught for forty years for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, retiring as
the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. He is currently an
emeritus faculty member, and serves on the faculty of the Master of
Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University in Oregon. Former
students include such well-known poets as Rita Dove, Norman Dubie,
Albert Goldbarth, James Tate, Larry Levis, and David St. John, and
others too numerous to mention here. He currently lives in Port
Townsend, Washington, and in Iow City, Iowa.

About the Poems
In 1994 Bell published what some reviewers regard as his most radical
work, The Book of the Dead Man, about which Prairie Schooner said
that Bell had fashioned "a dazzling linguistic Chinese box, at once
alluring and elusive, which shows up for once and for all (maybe) the
emptiness of 'Language Poetry' and, in fact, much recent

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 9

experimental and postmodern writing." Others said, in
Poietry magazine for instance, that "Bell is really out thereâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;
trying to invent a new kind of poetry, something like an epic
with only one character."
Richard Jackson, writing for the North American Review,
called The Book of the Dead Man "one of the most complex,
most original books in a long time," and added that Bell deals
with both internal and external forces but does not see them
as necessarily separate: "The counterpointed vision also
means that to talk about the cosmos is to talk about the self
and its tiniest sensations, to talk about government is to talk
about the self's needsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one thing is always seen in contrast to
several other things." He concluded, "What The Book of the
Dead Man does, by its verbal pyrotechnics, is redefine
sensibility, and this is the most essential thing any poetry can
do. . . . This is an astounding feat. There's not a greater gift any
poet or poetry can bring."
In Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume Two, and in
Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, Bell continues in a
similar mode, darkly rendering what a Publishers Weekly
contributor described as "the thin line that separates the real
from the unreal, the illuminated from the dim, the living from
the dead."

Page 10 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

L. B. Green
It’s Late Here
It’s Dylan’s raining all over the world night.
I wish you had an address. Street numbers:
a guarantee you’ll receive the tomes, for good or ill,
the ones you requested of me and I send to you email
over the last three years. A time
in which you and I have learned to hold one another
in metonym’s
sun-heated waves as they continue the lap
and tongue of shores.
Because you travel, again, and I remain
eager to learn:
about Bornean men and mountains where
twelve zones away you write, I happily sit among
the rice terraces north of town.

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About L. B. Green
L. B. Green is currently working on a fourth book of poems.
The poem “It’s Late Here” herein this issue of Nine Mile is
drawn from the ongoing
manuscript. She will read from the
work-in- progress while writer in
residence at the VCCA’s Moulin à
Nef Studio in Auvillar, France, in
September, 2015. Her books
include Judas Trees North of the
House, Night Garden, and THE
ART OF SEEING. Also a visual artist
and photographer, she lives and
works in Davidson, North
Carolina.

About the Poems
More and more often now, as I grow older, I ask myself
questions, questions such as: “What is nearness? What is
distance? What is love? What determines truth? What is
reality? Is a thing transparent akin to a thing opaque?” On,
and on. And find myself not one whit wiser, only more open
to thought, more convinced that all art reveals: the pain of
loss and betrayal, the heights and joys of human love and
companionship. So that again and again, consistently, I look
for light in the details of Nature because I am, body and
soul, part of Nature, part of the infinite.
“The mind is an active organ which moulds and coordinates
sensations into ideas,” Kant said. And in that declarative
statement I find my peace and happiness.

Page 12 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Lisa Zerkle
Trinket
1. a small ornament, piece of
jewelry, etc.
2. a trifle or toy
(from Middle English trenket,
shoemakers’ knife, from Old
French trenchier, to cut)

An elephant hide
is an inch thick,
but they can feel
a fly alight.
*
Time and luck grow
an elephant — months
of enough water and forage
swell the belly.
*
If the young escape
hyenas’ teeth, once
grown, they have no
natural enemies.
*
On the radio, they say
some Chinese believe
elephants shed tusks simply
as children lose baby teeth.
*
In the wild, their trumpets
rumble for miles. Some

of their cries are too low
for human ears.
*
When elephants
unearth skeletons
of family, they stroke
the bones.
*
The herd covers their dead
with bark and leaves.
Scientists say
they appear to grieve.
*

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Cachalot
When whalers sliced open the huge, squarish skulls and
beheld the milky liquid inside, they believed it semen and
named the whale “sperm,” away as they were long months at
sea. Toiling for a portion of profit split too many ways,
loneliness the least of their worries. How easy to gash your
own flesh flensing blubber into leaves thin as Bible pages,
splatter oil from boiling try-pots, or slip on decks slick with
gore. Around the ship, the dead stench, that fog seeping into
weave of clothes and deep into skin and hair. The sailors’ one
luxury — lanterns filled with fresh oil sweet as early grass
butter.
Evenings in Boston, Brahmins gathered around oil lamps in
parlors. In civilized pursuit of knowledge, gentlemen read the
Bible or the latest from Mr. Hawthorne or Melville. Ladies
embroidered neat stitches, the rise and flash of needle
through canvas. At night they retired, led by the steady burn
of a spermaceti candle, a light so fine it set the standard for
luminous intensity. No smoke or whiff of fish and barely a
flicker of shadow cast on the wall.

Page 14 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

RE: Zona Intangible, Ecuador
President Correa, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to buy a beetle,
the one whose back bears a golden oval, the blue
jewel, the one scalloped in scarlet, or the one
that seems hammered from delicate metal.
I need the caterpillars, too. The fat cigar
whose head ends in a rakish Fantasia mop,
the inchworm with crimson tips and racing stripes,
even the one bristled in jagged spikes.
The oil companies slick back their hair and ply you
with foiled chocolates, hothouse flowers. Trust us.
How much for the grasshopper that mimics moss,
the praying mantis seemingly made of sticks,
and the moth with wise eyes warning from its wings?
In Quito, you carry the weight of the world.
Your young need schools, your poor need food. You say
they cannot be beggars sitting on a sack of gold.
But gas is gas is gas. Nothing precious about a wavy shimmer
in the air, that tang at the back of the throat.
Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got a fortune there at the nexus of
Amazon and Andes. A dozen different monkeys,
the white-bellied spider, the red howler, the wooly,
the marmoset that could sit in my palm. What would
people give to hear how loud that noisy night monkey is?
Pipelines follow roads, those hard-packed scars

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snaking across acres of green. Keep instead
the frogs with polka dots, the little fish that live
in the jaguarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s muddy paw prints.

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A Long Vacation Somewhere Far Away
is where you must be.
The night you left,
the Barred Owl I’d heard for years but never seen
held her ground, looked at me before
the bellows of her wings lifted her into the trees.
When you come back, I’ll tell you
about the bats who flew laps around the oak in my yard,
darting after bugs like small dark dogs chasing after a ball.
That night, I made blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup
for my son because he asked, and I knew you would have
said yes.
I keep seeing you from the back:
at the mall, in the airport, and once, behind the wheel
of a baby blue convertible, top down. I hope
you’ve found a private beach, one with shells
on pastel sand. And a man who laughs at your jokes.
I want to tell you about the turtle,
stopped like a rock in the middle of the road, how
he fanned his feet through the air when I lifted him
from the street, set him on a safer path through the grass.
His tough shell not enough to guard that tender flesh.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 17

About Lisa Zerkle
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry
Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod,
Sixfold, poemmemoirstory,
Crucible, and Main Street
Rag, among others. She is
the author of Heart of the
Light. She lives in Charlotte,
NC where she is an editor of
Kakalak.

About the Poems
In two of these poems,
(Trinket and RE: Zona
Intangible, Ecuador), I’m
thinking about what things
are “worth.” How is it
calculated? Is it the pure
exchange of item for cash?
How much do we as humans
want elephants and
undiscovered insects around
for our children and grandchildren? In a novel approach,
the president of Ecuador asked First World countries to pay
to leave a pristine part of the Amazon intact, but few
stepped up and (of course) oil companies offered much
more. Humans are only one of almost nine million species
on earth. Whether other species are allowed to flourish or
perish seems to depend on how much or little we assign to
their value.
A Long Vacation Somewhere Far Away is for a friend who
died unexpectedly. When I read a good book, I still have to
stop myself from thinking to share it with her. I’m still
“talking” to her in my head. This poem is some version of
that conversation.
Page 18 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Martin Willitts Jr
Snowy Landscape with Arles in the
Background
Based on the Van Gogh painting, 1888, painted one day
after the painting, Landscape with Snow
Another snow replaced the last
halting movement
so I may paint this scene
with hushed praise
there are miles of silence
beginning and ending
no starting point
like an argument
only the sound of a brush
individual snowflakes
puffs of cold breath
hedge grass shuffling its feet
God telling me what to do
blue stillness
absence of crows
lack of church bells
my hands carry these empty miles
sudden as an cast-aside row boat
where there is no water
overgrown with weeds and lost hope

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Blackbird
Where the man walked, the earth broke away
into distant futures as a deluge of sadness.
The earth broke like a stick at the suggestion of birds.
It sounded like knitting needles making a sweater
from skeins knowing intense panic.
His heart clinked like ice against a glass of lemonade,
for he had seen a red-winged blackbird
for the first time and it moved as bedroom curtains
when two people make love behind them.
It is crucial to have such moments. To see
the unexpected when no one else is looking.
He did not have to share this with just anyone.
He could hoard it. His hungry eyes had filled with it.
When he walked, the earth broke into music
from a field of red poppies. Never mind the harvesters
reaping them for drugs, or the music escaping as bees.
Never mind the translators of the unknown. Never mind
the blue sweater perfect for hiking into the lemon
remoteness.
A blackbird with a red patch on its wing, studied the man
with equal curiosity. It was deciding if it should sing.

Page 20 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

About Martin Willitts Jr.
Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New
York. He has had poems
in Stone Canoe, Blue
Fifth, Nine Mile,
Centrifugal Eye,
Kentucky Review,
Comstock Review, and
many others. He won
the International Dylan
Thomas Poetry Award
(2014) for the
centennial. He has over
20 chapbooks and 8 full
length collections. His
forthcoming books
include “How to Be Silent” (FutureCycle Press), “God Is Not
Amused With What You Are Doing In Her Name” (Aldrich
Press).

About The Poems
“Snowy Landscape with Arles in the Background” is a stripeddown poem of 5 stanzas, 4 lines each, with no punctuation.
Only the essence remains. The structure allows for the
shortness of breath like trudging through fields of snow.
Vincent van Gogh painted two versions of the same snowy
landscape, one day apart. In this painting, he chooses the view
which includes, oddly, a rowboat. There does not seem to be
any water, river, lake, for the row boat. It is out of place until
van Gogh includes it. This rather quiet poem is like a William
Carlos Williams poem. But there are details all around in this
poem. Sometimes, in snow, there is such quietness you feel you
could hear some noise from miles away. In central New York,
we see our share of snow. I have gone on those isolated snowy

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 21

days to the remote fields to hear that amazing stillness.
Inside that stillness I find the tiniest sounds, sometimes
from within, sometimes, apparently from nowhere.
“Blackbird” is the same exploration of barren fields of
silence, and what might be found inside the silence. Both
poems have distance. Both are seen, rather than
experienced. This is a field of brokenness. Why this man is
walking in the woods is never made clear. He is within his
own aloneness. Then he notices the red-winged blackbird,
and everything around him changes focus. I say “It is crucial
to have such moments.” We all need some point where we
notice the world around us, and suddenly we find it
amazing. The red patch on a blackbird’s wing is a good focal
point; suddenly there are other colors and music. To me,
this poem is about having a religious experience; for
someone else this poem could be about something else as
simple as a blackbird.

Page 22 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Jeremy T. Wattles
Sins of Place
They came from miles around
to sit on father’s couch—
breaking bread,
a new development.
From four to fourteen dozen
we were—
a crumbling grange
in need of scraping, primer, white paint;
a fire hall room with
grey carpet, bunks
in the basement
yellow plastic covers,
cold tiled floors;
a corner pizza shop,
red walls and sloping roof
next to lawn mower repair,
snowblower spark plugs,
stacked red jerry cans;
breaking ground, consecrated—
new brick, new development,
a clean spire, money
for a paved driveway.
For a time I knew grace—
yet, if destruction
of the dream is inherent
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in the act of achievement—
The first stained glass window
with a name—what
do you do with gifts
you do not want?
Hide and seek, touch football,
leaf piles. Confirmation,
youth group – listening, learning
without knowing how to
offer a sermon—
My oldest friend from the age
of grace, the age of two.
After the exile he first built
a driverless car for the army,
and now sculpts or sails
in Alaska or Denmark.
They came from miles around
to fight about dead men’s
names in stained glass,
would not break bread.
There are sons who shun
their parents who never see
grandchildren, cards from
aging spinsters each Christmas
and and and

Page 24 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

What do the dead care
for stained glass?
Should grace extend to them,
they would whisperâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;
stop eating yourselves,
else whichever lot of you survives
must wander,
toil in grief,
for you have taken communion
yet created refugees.

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Release
Throw high your arms
and exhale.
Set down and sing a dirge over
your anti-aging
creamâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;
there are ashes in the water.
The West Virginians have
nothing to drink.
Throw high your arms
and sing
bring the Mars rocket back
to Earth
decouple the assumptions
latching the fuel boosters tight.
The seedling grasps after
fertilizer, your voice, your sacrifice.
Throw high your arms!
Join hands and carry the fire
from your unplugged TV.
Mourn the blasted mountaintops, the overturned
cemeteries;
guard what earth remains, the seedling, the covenant.
Teach your child to tie together
their red shoelaces, but first
their roots.

Page 26 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Orion’s Song
Some of us dream of creating
water with our arms strapped tight,
chests sucked in.
Roots are to be cut,
and seeds transported – we will take life
from the ash—
shot into space on a burning tower.
You whine of relative privation—
African villages with candles
in a world of light bulbs, dying
of infection in a world of penicillin.
Your nirvana fallacy, your drug
has left your imagination in chains,
and eviscerated your verse.
We sing Orion’s song,
the quaking roar of our fuel boosters—
three columns of star bright flame
in harmony like Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
They gird us along the weighing beam;
we will not call them the three marys,
perhaps kings, though they too will fall
to the shuddering earth of Cape Canaveral.
Age is no matter, nor decadent lotions.
We are the fraction of untouchable travelers—

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the nomad faction carrying our own fire
like Marco Polo, Columbus, Da Gama,
stricken and rusting Mars will yield
us a colony, children, a new frontier
distillation.
Rilkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traveler brought back a pure gentian wordâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;
we will send an image of a quartz flower
shining in the weathered scrabble,
a new divergent identity to be mined
out of the glittering madness of explorers
one hundred million miles away.

Page 28 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Ready for November
I was ready to lose the light,
for cold snaps and bad coughs,
poor health and sallow paling skin.
Ready for bitter jealous dreams
of warm southern climes,
and waking to another short sodden Scottish day;
I was ready to grin and bear high growling winds,
embrace enervation, hunker down,
ready to accept the hibernation of soul.
But it’s galling, it raises the bile,
to think how fit I was.
All those numb November miles
only two, three years ago.
The hotburning slowbeating heart and body of a hunter…
autumnal training runs along Lake Moraine Causeway,
through forgotten towns—Poolville, Preston, Tyner—
a closeknit jostling jocular pack of boys
hammering up hillsides
legs pistoning beside creek beds and farm flats—
the vision representative of the kill,
hot and sour nostalgia served for the ravenous.
Firstworld privileged dreams, a luxury
fueled by metaphysical hungers.
I wasn’t ready for sweating smackheads on Princes Street
begging for enough buschange to nail a fix;
for paralyzing ironies of oil politics—

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the petrol in your fuel-efficient car came at the expense of a
clean stream
in the Niger Delta. Now child soldiers with oil in their guts
want revenge for their poisoned mothers—
A-Ks in hand, they are paddling up to drilling platforms in
wooden canoes.
Instead I’d sussed out savvy comparisons
for the drear Scottish winter…
the wind blasting you as you walk hunched
across George IV Bridge to catch the 23 bus
like the exhaled gasps of tourists climbing Arthur’s Seat;
the mottled and charcoalblackened stone buildings
like the raindrenched treebark.
Only one month.
This will pass; this will balance…
But I can’t shake the deep cold bite
the seeping presentiment of the penultimate:
November as Harbinger.
All things advance accordingly—
a chuckle and rattle at my back
guiding this visceral glimpse.
November as vision, a prophecy
of the cough that carries me off,
the withered senile end,
annual rehearsal for the final hour.
Oh, but Scottish winters make me maudlin!
I find myself lighting votive candles at odd hours,
fret over fusty clothes and frowning locals,
Page 30 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

I’d give a week’s pay for a tender evening with Miss K…
…November in the soul:
Ishmael, I see your face.
I’ve boarded your gray ship—
I hear the windlass creaking,
the snap of your sails.
I even tried to stop navelgazing,
quit sailing oceans of selfpity—
instead, to accept metallic dreams,
and the end of interest-only payments.
I sail back to port, anchor, organize friends for a night out
to double as a dose of forgetfulness.
Even on the dancefloor,
under red neon bliss,
swimming through hardfi hifi deep vinyl bass,
after a shot of cinnamon mescal and
a kiss from the girl with the tit tape
in the silver dress,
even here I thought I was ready for the black overthinking.
The days until departure spreading out before me.
Another vision of slow loss, a new exile.
America calls, demands a sale:
trade this deathdriven winter
for the winter of “home”—
Syracuse snowpacks and gutters of foot-thick ice;
cups of yellow eggnog with ground nutmeg
and blowing clouds of white snowcrystals.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 31

Anodyne artificial comforts will waneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;
snowcrystals and saturated fat will become cruelly beautiful.
Repatriation is no cure.
New dreams arise,
leave their leaden residue of division.

Page 32 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Return, Exile
This begins with an uncatholic command
from Cromwell’s cruel heart—
march south, you vanquished barbarous Scots,
you crown-loving Covenanters.
March south, from Dunbar’s seaside
to Durham cathedral cell;
there three-fifths of you shall die,
and await Bonnie Prince Charlie in Hell.
Where is my name before 1650?
Lost in an unrecorded line,
a deep running root
of rooster-tenders and mud
makers.
Once, perhaps, an Englishman traveled north…
bedded or wedded a brooding Gaelic girl,
I imagine her: small, darkhaired, and fair—
a hawkish, Pictish face.
I fancy they lived in the Borders,
perhaps in pretty, prejudiced Peebles.
Him the incomer, her the gutterbluid.
From the gutter, from the mud,
this name emerges, morphs, becomes history;
a captured man named John Woodall marching in the
cold—
stubborn survivor bound for Durham and deportation.

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Rumi People
Rumi people ruin me—
the light in their eyes is too much.
I leave too many doors unlocked
and they won’t shut up.
Singing sweetly of the Beloved,
they demand to be embraced.
And this city – D.C. with its penile
eponymous monument poking the sky,
with searing outlaw sunsets
over the Potomac
like shimmering red gold lust,
with decade old memories
of hands clasped passing by the Scottish Rite temple
of verses requited
while cooking omelets naked—
this city ruins me.
Rumi people – I dabble at being one.
Cast away poison lead weights
of blue inhibition.
I drive out sneering Fear
with his tight black shirt.
I let the light of their eyes pierce me,
waves and particles buffet me.
I’m at dinner, full on shrimp and grits,
talking with Rumi people about the Beloved
and failure and glory.
The vanishing wine and the light in it
fills up a bubble and surrounds us.

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The gauzy surface is named: Joyful Celebration,
the atmosphere inside: The Flashing Wholeness
Of A Moment,
the pealing laughter: Electricity.
Do Rumi people live like this each day?
All this muchness and suchness?
This current takes, shakes, makes—
a red dress with no underwear,
a hand slapping against a stomach,
a cup of wine like a bubble –
what’s left but to confuse the Beloved with sex?
They leave behind a revolution of consciousness—
perhaps casting a tether out and away.
It should be a blessing, though
I seem to have an extra anchor of ignorance
in the sludge at the bottom of the Potomac,
the sediment and rust of all my days.
What do these Rumi people, these Sufis, see?
This thirteenth century club might be a cult…
all these words, all this affirmation.
In this city I find and lose Rumi—
stoked, stroked, ruined, remade I am
again impoverished of his words.
I no longer know what to do
when I see the Beloved.

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About Jeremy T. Wattles
Jeremy T. Wattles works at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges, organizing volunteer projects and tutoring
programs for college students, as well as contributing to
community organizing and community based scholarship.
He has published
poetry in university
publications as a
student, and in the
online literary
magazine Textualities.
In 2013, Star Cloud
Press published Swept
Out of A Dead Frontier,
his critical analysis of
contemporary fiction
of the American West.
For the last few years, Jeremy has been working on a
collection of poems exploring themes of exile.

About The Poems
These six poems are part of a larger collection that I have
been working on for several years, titled Return, Exile. I
have sought to explore the themes of expatriation,
traveling, returning to a place you used to call home, and
growing into adulthood while simultaneously piecing
together these different ways of living into something
coherent, at least to yourself. How does place influence our

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identity formation? What parts of history, of a
relationship, of a city, do you hold on to or let go? What
about these travels and different ways of being in the
world haunt you, give you peace, or become part of your
personal belief system? Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco,
Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda have been strong
influences during this time.

"Sins of Place" is a poem about my father, who is a
minister, and one of the churches he led when I was a
young boy. To my young eyes it was a vital, growing, and
healthy place that eventually became corrupted, ultimately
destroying itself and casting everyone in that community
out to fend for themselves. The irony here is that in our
particular Protestant tradition we are called not to invest
emotionally in buildings or individual spiritual leaders, and
yet we did so to the point of destruction. Ever since I've
had a hard time trusting groups of believers, though I
simultaneously find myself drawn to that sort of close-knit
group, when there's a healthy dynamic.

"Release" and "Orion's Song" are poems in dialogue with
each other. The first takes the point of view that we must
atone for the violence we have done to our planet, and we
must temper our relentless consumer culture and
impulses. The second is a reply to that call - it takes a dim
view of this earthbound philosophy, and believes that our
future lies in our ingenuity and in those rare humans who
push boundaries in order to ensure survival and acquisition
of new resources. I don't know quite where I fit on this
continuum - perhaps like some dialectic relationship we

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think we need both - but I like the strong voices I hear in
their arguments.

"Ready for November" is a rather sprawling poem where
the narrator ostensibly fears what the beginning of winter
represents, but eventually we see that he has deeper issues
of belonging apart from somewhat ironically rendered
existential dread. He is also somewhat embarrassed by his
privilege and not sure how to reconcile that to his lifestyle.
Herman Melville inspired a significant part of this poem.

"Return, Exile" is an imagined take on family history. As far
as I can tell, my given surname comes from a defeated
Scottish Covenanter, captured in the Battle of Dunbar
against Oliver Cromwell in 1650, and after being held as a
prisoner of war for more than a year and watching
thousands of his fellow soldiers die, was deported from
Britain on a boat to Boston and sold into indentured
servitude in the New World, never to see his home country
or whatever family he may have had again. I hope that one
day I can expand this into a larger series of poems
imagining his journey and life after he comes to the
Massachusetts Bay colony.

"Rumi People" is about the confusion that the narrator
feels over Rumi's concept of the Beloved. He is traveling
and finds himself caught up unexpectedly in a situation
that evokes memories of past lovers. He is left feeling
befuddled, blessed, aroused, guilty, repressed, and
profoundly uncertain of what meaning there may or may

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not be in chance attractions and encounters, set against the
inertia of daily life.

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Bill Schulz
Midnight Bucolic
Love the jacket.
Love the scarf,
red, isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it?
Is this Vermont?
The sheep nodding
in the valleys.
Put on your boots,
the ones like Dadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.
The leaves just tinkle
as we walk by.
Hey friend
who taught me
nightmares,
is it me
or is it
the camera angle,
when you sit there,
jacket hung
on its Shaker
peg,
you look like Frost

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in his barn
listening to the hens
gaggling all night.

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Segno di pace
His hands are small,
fingers sharp somehow;
you wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t linger
in a handshake or
other sign of peace,
peace may be there
but not that certain
and not that long.
I think of Giugno
who lived in the fields
and oaks beside our
barn, small and tough,
like half a brick. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d burn
the last of the olive wood,
drink from the unlabelled
bottles and watch talk
shows, Giugno sleeping
on my legs, his needly
claws retracting just
before puncturing my skin.

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About Bill Schulz
I was born and raised in Maine and now live in Portland on a
hill that looks across an old ice pond. Maine natives tend to
look at life with a well-earned and
somewhat healthy skepticism.
One of the state’s marketing
slogans is “The way life should
be.” A real Mainer wants to add a
line, “...but really isn’t.” Maine is
4th of July on Penobscot Bay,
sailboats, blueberry pies, and a
crusty old timer in a so’wester
hat saying “ayuh,” sure. But for
most of us who can’t afford to
live the life of visitors to
“Vacationland,” Maine can be as
hard as granite and harsh as a
winter’s day on the North Atlantic. My poems have been
grown in this hard, rocky soil; sometimes you get
blueberries and sometimes you get potatoes.
I once tried bending birches in the woods off a back road in
Hebron, Maine. I was walking with my prep school
roommate on a cold and snowy Sunday afternoon,
discussing our most recent class on Robert Frost. It seemed
like the right thing to do – until we were hanging high off
the earth, hands cold and bleeding from the climb, tree NOT
bent to the ground “Like girls on hands and knees that
throw their hair/
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.” It was a
good lesson in both practical prosody and theology – one
that I’ve not forgotten.
I hold Master’s Degrees in English from the poetry workshop
at The University of New Hampshire and in theology from
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The Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California. My
poetry has appeared in The Seneca Review, Kansas Quarterly,
Nine Mile and other publications.

About the Poems
“Midnight Bucolic” was written for my “friend who taught me
nightmares,” Galway Kinnell, who I never met. I regret never
hearing him read The Book of Nightmares from beginning to
end, hearing him read those last lines as if to comfort me:
Sancho Fergus! Don't cry!/Or else, cry./On the body,/on the
blued flesh, when it is/ laid out, see if you can find/the one flea
which is laughing. I first read it in the early 70s, just after the
death of my father. I found the poetry equally comforting and
unnerving - still do.
I don’t recall ever seeing a photo of Galway Kinnell in a lanternlit barn in Vermont. But it is how I have thought of him and how
I will always see him.
The sign of peace - segno di pace - is at the very heart of the
Roman Catholic Mass. I once shared the sign of peace with a
Catholic priest with thin, bony, cold hands. It was an uneasy
peace.
The Giugno in the poem is a semi-feral Italian cat. The priest
and Giugno had much in common. Interestingly, the word feral
can be translated several ways in Italian. The basic translation is
ferino. But you could also use bestiale, funereo, or tetro.
Indeed, the priest and Guigno had much in common.

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Don Mager
January Journal:
Monday, January 14, 2013
With its open eye, moon watches the
calligraphy of Hawks sketched across
the clean sky. One—a pair—now all at
once, six—arc and float. The atmosphere
ambushes upturned hand-shaded eyes
with disbelieving amazement of
Robin eggshell—everywhere. Touching
each compass point and mid-day hour, blue
goes on and on and on. The languor
of Hawk flight belies its urgency
of hungry time. As shadowed eyes and
upturned palm welcome evanescence
in the air, the moon’s far orbit rides
pallid inattentive apathy.

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January Journal:
Monday, January 28, 2013
The creek’s bank-side shows its age-dry skin.
Where the dead grass’s hair thins, clay cracks
with crow’s feet creases. Some spots are as
still and bald as any stone. Exposed
like eviscerated nerves, dangling
above the creek bed’s trickle of slow
dementia, roots hang. Arthritic gnarls
of ankle-thick Wisteria vines
cling desperately to tree trunks. Like an
old friend making its daily visit
to the hospice, the dutiful
sun drags its cold shoulder across the
morning sky. The creek looks up and asks:
Is that you, old fella’? Here again?

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June Journal:
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
“And lord how they soar” neither blasphemes
nor reveres. Midday the barrage of cars
vanishes and heat irons pavements. The window
points out two Turkey Vultures bobbling
in the front lawn like wind-up fairground
curios. They twist the sheen of their
long necks as they beak the dead rabbit.
They point their throats to swallow. Pink globs
string from their beaks. Their neck sheens glint like
tinfoil. The window can’t stop staring
out. Such awkwardness in birds. Listen.
A cyclist blasts the sound barrier
and streaks past. First one then the other’s
wingspan takes flight “And lord how they soar.”

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About Don Mager
Don Magerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chapbooks and volumes of poetry are: To Track
the Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death,
Borderings, Good Turns, The Elegance of
the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook, Drive
Time and Russian Riffs. He is retired with
degrees from Drake University (BA),
Syracuse University (MA) and Wayne State
University (PhD). He was the Mott
University Professor of English at Johnson
C. Smith University from 1998-2004 where
he served as Dean of the College of Arts
and Letters (2005-2011). As well as a
number of scholarly articles, he has
published over 200 poems and
translations from German, Czech and
Russian. He lives in Charlotte, NC.
Us Four Plus Four is an anthology of
translations from eight major Soviet-era Russian poets. It is
unique because it tracks almost a half century of their careers
by simply placing the poems each wrote to the others in
chronological order. The 85 poems represent one of the most
fascinating conversations in poems produced by any group of
poets in any language or time period. From poems and
infatuation and admiration to anger and grief and finally to
deep tribute, this anthology invites readers into the unfolding
lives of such inimitable creative forces as Anna Akhmatova,
Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam.
These poems are from my new, as yet unpublished manuscript
volume entitled Present Tense. Poems from this volume have
been published or accepted by Iodine, Pif Magazine, Charlotte
Viewpoint: Metropolitan Ideas & Art, San Pedro Review, The

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Tower, Camel Saloon, River Poets Journal, Blast Furnace, The
Axe Factory, The Four Seasons Anthology (Hurricane Press),
Jellyfish Whispers and a selection of them constitute the
featured poet section of The LABLETTER 2015.

About The Poems
The poems are from a sequence of 365 poems in an as yet
unpublished volume, . . . the present tense . . . Allen Road
South, Charlotte, North Carolina. Annus Mirabilis 2013. The
book recordsthe specificity of one place as an account of a
“verifiable world.” It fulfills Pasternak’s injunction:
The living, verifiable world is the only enterprise of the
imagination that has ever succeeded and continues still to
succeed. Right here it continues successfully in its moment-bymoment newness.
The moment-by-momentness of each poem is limned by
present tense verbs only. A voice never identified as “I” but
rather by its metonymies speaks each poem’s fleeting
“thisness.” Synesthesia startles readers’ ears, eyes, noses and
tactile sensitivities with newness even as the journal’s place
confines itself to one yard, garden and house. Sameness and
newness play out their tensions in unrhymed syllabic sonnets
across whose fixed 126 syllables, sentences, phrases and lines
play. The poet’s “imagined ideal reader” might be one who
keeps this journal beside her to read a poem a day throughout
a year as the journal counterpoints her own heightened sense
of presentness.
Since the mid-90s I have read and studied a number of Stalinist
era writers and produced an opera a libretto about Anna
Akhmatova, as well as translations of her, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak,
Mandel’shtam and others. A number have been published over

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the years. Pasternak’s great early collections have fascinated
me because of the way his verbs animate the descriptions. The
above quoted injunction of his offered me a key to some
degree as to how he creates these astonishing effects. I
gradually realized that his descriptions, especially of nature,
never seek to memorialize a scene in some kind of generality:
this is what a snowstorm is like; this is what spring thaw looks
like. Rather, with him it is always “this” snowstorm, this hour
of thawing. These ideas became the impetus or my own
exploration of presnetness, thisness, thus . . . present tense…

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Thomasina DeMaio
Lawrence F.

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Last Tango

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Liarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dice

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San Francisco from Sausalito

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Selfie

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selfie hand

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Tatia with Book

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The Mission District from Bernal Hts

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The Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence

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Interview with Thomasina DeMaio
About her work Lawrence F
Nine Mile:

We love that picture of Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, which is why we decided to use
it as the cover of this issue of the magazine.
How did you come to meet him?

Thomasina:

Lawrence would come to the San Francisco
Art Institute often when I was in school there
in 1979 through 1985. He’d always come on
Fridays because there was an open drawing
session on those days. That’s how I met him.
I knew of him, of course.

Nine Mile:

The relationship developed from there?

Thomasina:

We still sort of only knew each other. But
then one day he breezed into my studio and
said that he really liked the stretcher bars I
was using. These were reverse stretcher bars
that gave a reverse facet on the front that
popped the painting. He said that he was
going to use them with his paintings also. I
said, Gee, Lawrence, then everybody will
think it’s yours. And he said, no no, it’s okay.
Anyway, he started using the stretcher bars
and we started seeing each other regularly at
the Institute, having coffee, and we became
friends. When he’d go off to Europe or
Colorado on a reading tour or whatever he’d
let me use his studio at Hunter’s Point. I
started going to his drawing sessions on
Saturday, and it went on like that over the
years. I got to know him well. He gave me a
show at the City Lights bookstore.

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Nine Mile:

Funny that he’s this well-known poet,
but he also wants to be a painter.

Thomasina:

Lawrence wanted to be an artist also,
and so did a lot of those poets.

Nine Mile:

How did you come to paint him?

Thomasina:

At the time I was painting two or three
portraits a week, and right then I was
painting Gregory Corso, and then
Micheline, and I figured Lawrence
would be perfect. I like to do things in
series, to get some continuity. I asked
him and he came to my studio wearing
all the same color blue denim. That’s
how I painted him. I’ve lost those
paintings. Even the Micheline one was
ripped off….

Nine Mile:

You were hanging out with these guys
for awhile.

Thomasina:

Mostly with Jack Micheline. The other
guys made a big commotion when you
we're out in public with them. You
couldn’t have a nice quiet drink with
them.

Nine Mile:

What about Kerouac? Did you know
him too?

Thomasina:

I didn’t know him, but the whole group
of them were misogynist, except for
Micheline. He was always courteous to
women, but the rest of them…. Of
course, I’m from a different generation,
and we saw things differently. They

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were all from the fifties, and I was a hippie
basically. Different sensibilities.
Nine Mile:

Things must have worked out, because
they kept coming back,

Thomasina:

Always. They would come in as a crowd,
and my husband would head out the door.
They had a big appetite for drugs, and he
was a doctor. It was not a good mix.

Nine Mile:

Some would say that they wrote the way
they lived.

Thomasina:

From what I saw, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about right.

Nine Mile:

Have you read much of Ferlinghettiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
poetry?

Thomasina:

I have. Some of it is terrific. His Ode to
Jack Kerouac is lovely.
disguised as an American fullback in plaid shirt
crossing and recrossing America
in speedy cars

I love that. There are a lot of stories about
Lawrence. He really started publishing
things on his own and in other places.
Nine Mile:

He became a real poetry entrepreneur. A
Cooney Island of the Mind has sold a
million or so copies. City Lights exploded.

Thomasina:

It started as a vanity press. His first books
were his own, Pictures of the Gone World,
and then Rexroth, Patchen, Ginsberg,
Levertov, all the rest.

Nine Mile:

Is he still around, are you still friends?

Thomasina:

He is. I stopped drawing over there
awhile ago, and he pretty much stopped

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drawing. And when we’d go over there, a
group of about five or six of us, he’d wind
up sleeping on the sofa. He’s 96, and not
looking so good.
Nine Mile:

What I noticed about the picture of him is
the eyes. So incredible. It’s the first thing
that grabs you.

Thomasina:

Well, that’s how he is. Extremely intense
when you’re around him. Eye are like that
today. He really scans you with his blue
piercing eyes. The last time I saw him, he
looked the same, those same intense
eyes, and then he drank some wine and
then went over and slept on the couch
while the rest of us finished the session.

Note: Jack Micheline, mentioned in this interview, was a
poet and painter from the Bronx who settled in San
Francisco in the early ’60’s and became part of the Beat
Generation. In 1957, Troubadour Press published his first
book River of Red Wine, with an introduction by Jack
Kerouac . It was reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire. He
published over twenty books, some of them mimeographs
and chapbooks. Micheline characterized the Beat
movement as a product of media hustle, and hated being
categorized as a Beat poet. He was also a painter, working
primarily with gouache in a self-taught, primitive style.

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About Thomasina DeMaio
Thomasina DeMaio was born in Elmira Ny and raised in
Syracuse,educated in San Francisco.

About the Work
My statement or mission is just to PUSH PAINT. How
does one write about oneself? I can't say much about my
art except that I try to work everyday and incorporate it in my
life as one would seek water daily. Without it I am not much of
a communicator
but through my art
I can say so much.
I can show you
where one of the
last public
telephones in SF
is. I also can show
you buildings in
San Francisco that
no longer exist as
the techies take over the city and "Zuck" tears down more to
build his empire. I can show anyone at anytime where the best
pupusa lady lurks competing only with the tamale lady who I
have also documented in oil pigments. My smearing has taken
me from the drag queens and wayward Sisters of Perpetual
Indulgence to San Francisco's Fire Department.
Influenced by WPA murals and so many of those artists,
Benton, Marsh combined with an absolute devotion to Robert
Henri has led me down this path of figuring out how to push
paint most effectively to get to the essence of the subject at
hand. The first four letters of the word paint says it all. I two

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studios in SF,one at home and one in the Mission where I
am doing an extensive documentation of the people
before it is all gone . Pushing paint ,making art is one of
the last good things to do in this world and I have a lot to
learn, to see and record.
Lawrence F..1981.oil on canvas 36 by 28 inches
Last Tango 1981 oil on canvas 6 feet x 10 feet
Liars Dice 1980 oil on canvas 6 feet x 8 feet
San Francisco from Sausalito 2015 oil on canvas 14 x 24
inches
Selfie 2015 6 x 8 inches oil on carton board
Selfie Hand 2015 8 x 10 inches inches oil on board
Tatia with Book 8 x10 inches 2015 oil on canvas
The Mission District from Bernal Hts 2015 oil on canvas
14 x 16 inches
The Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence 1990 oil on canvas 6
ft x 8 ft

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Debra Hutchison
Buttes, Hoodoos, and The Crestview
The summer of 1964 my family traveled away far from our
farm and herd of Holsteins. We escaped in our white ford
fairlane dented by a hailstorm. Took to the highway. At our
feet in the back seat sat a sack with chopped ham sandwiches
on white bread with bright yellow mustard, bright yellow
cheese curls, warm root beer. After seven hours we entered
the Badlands. Strange forms and shapes towered. Shadowclouds covered the ground. Drove along with us. Buttes and
hoodoos. I imagined Indians on the horizon. They wanted to
kill everyone but me. I went with them. On some ponies. We
rode off and left everyone burning. In the car. There was a
Ghost Dance. I saw herds of buffalo, running horses, fires
burning high. It was 102 degrees. My pink underwear was
clinging to wet blue vinyl. Smoke blew around me. Lipstick
cigarettes. Signals I could not understand. After a ten-hour car
ride, my father pulled into the Crestview. White and low to the
ground. We circled our wagons. A woman with a tag Esther
sat behind a window. Neon sign flashing. VACANACY.
VACANCY. VACANCY. Blond hair twirled around turquoise
curlers. From her printed housedress she pulled out keys. They
jingled on her wrist like the jailor in the jailhouse. In another
hand a dog held like a baby. She limped down to room 9 and
threw open the curtains. Her dog wet on the carpet. She said
she would give us a 20-dollar discount. My father said weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d
take it. We hit the jackpot. A cheap room with a pool. I
jumped in the water. I forged the stream. I looked for the

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hoodoos in the distance. Looked for a warrior. I was a wildhorse rider. A shadow shaped like a pillow hung over me. I held
my breath as long as I could. Held my eyes open. While I was
under. Walked around later with chlorine vision. In the parking
lot a man was wiping dust off his hubcap. I pulled the straps up
on my swimsuit. I begged my mother to braid my hair, but she
was too tired. In the mirror. I tried to twist the three strands
together. Tried to find a feather. It was dark. It was
backwards. I had to fake it all. I had to fake the whole thing.

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Ode to Pluto
I refuse to let go of Pluto.
My tiny planet that drifted
on a hand-made mobile
like a dream. Cut roughly
circles from a gray carton.
Plutoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distance comforted me.
It was mine.
Small, obscure, uneventful
dangling in the universe far away
from places. Larger or brighter.
Saturn with rings of fire.
Mars with possibilities. Mercury
and Venus, dangerously close to the Sun.
Jupiter a giant. Uranus and Neptune
paired in their cool blueness.
And Earth had us.
They all had something.
Pluto is the fly speck on the window.
The freckle in my right eye.

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About Debra Hutchison
Her poems have been published in Southern Indiana Review,
Flyway: A Literary Review, The Mid-America Review, Iowa
Writes, an on-line publication
at the University of Iowa, and
the Comstock Review. She
grew up on a farm in central
Iowa and currently lives in
Syracuse, New York.

About the Poems
The poem “Buttes, Hoodoos,
and the Crestview” was
created through an exercise to
push myself by changing form.
All of my poems were beginning to have the same shape, so I
decided to play with a prose poem. This poem is a celebration
of a child’s imagination and how that imagination has the
power to transcend ordinary experience.
The poem “Ode to Pluto” was created out of the loss I felt
when I learned that Pluto was taken away as a planet. The
voice in this poem takes Pluto back. The ending of this poem
surprised me as I hope it surprises the reader.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 73

Stephen Kuusisto
Notes, Divigations, Impromptus, & Asides:
Tate, Kerouc, Transtromer, & Hamill
How the New York Times Failed James Tate
One of my favorite quotes about obituary writers appears in
Mark Helprin's novel "Winter's Tale" and it goes like this:
The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring
through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see
swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.
I was put in mind of Helprin's squib when I fell onto William
Grimes' obit of the poet James Tate which was clearly ripped
from the notebook of a lazy tourist. Given Mr. Tate's
prominence one can scarcely imagine a vaunted paper like the
New York Times approving so many cliches in any paragraph let
alone the opening one:
Mr. Tate burst on the poetry scene in 1967 with the collection
“The Lost Pilot,” selected for publication in the Yale Series of
Younger Poets while he was still a graduate student at the
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Julian Symons, in The
New Statesman, greeted Mr. Tate as “an ironical, original, selfabsorbed poet who glances with amusement at love, humanity,
himself.”
And if that doesn't satisfy your appetite for pap, hold on to
your bowl for here's the second paragraph:
A prolific writer, he turned out one collection after another,
none of them slim. “The Ghost Soldiers,” published in 2008,
contains nearly 100 poems. He won a wide following, especially
among younger readers attracted by his colloquial style, his gift
for making unexpected connections, and his ability to extract
humor from dark places. John Ashbery, one of his most ardent
admirers, called him “the poet of possibilities, of morph, of
surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous.
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Grimes' meretricious blab (culled from second hand sources
no less) laden with limp lingo and a patrician tone suggests
the passing of a first rate American poet deserves nothing
more than granulated rubber.
I had to rub my eyes. You'd imagine, reading this that James
Tate turned out innumerable fat books of verse, all of them
colloquial and vaguely adolescent. Moreover you'd assume
the English countryside is home to tiny cows.
Later Grimes tries to right himself but fails to recognize the
jokes buried in an interview with the poet Charles Simic and
the parodic sensibility Tate brought to discussions about
craft--an inheritance from Marcel DuChamp and Stephen
Mallarme.
Indeed I thought of Mallarme while reading Grimes as he said
famously a newspaper is fit only for wrapping fish.
No one outside of Norman Podhoretz would go to the
obituaries for literary consciousness but let's remember
Walter Whitman's optimistic suggestion that a nation of great
poets should be a nation equally filled with great readers.
You will never know from Grimes that James Tate was a
student of aleatoric findings in language; that he was deeply
read in the contingencies of philosophy; and was a lyric poet
of breathtaking originality.
I will let the poet have the last word:
Dear Reader
I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.
I'll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 75

If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe
start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don't know but I keep working, working
half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.

“Thank You Jack Kerouac”
I am not sentimental. I am very sentimental. I’m not easy. I’m
very easy. This morning I’m letting reality weigh itself. I’m
very free.
Unlike Jack Kerouac I’m not in a hurry. Maybe that’s because I
can’t drive.
(Well, blind people, “can” drive, but it’s not advisable,
especially if we generally like humanity, and I “do” love my
odd, dented, still aborning fellow citizens…)
I’m free…and yes, I’m thinking of Kerouac this morning in
particular:

i will write
it, all the talk of the world
everywhere in this morning, leaving open parentheses sections
for my own accompanying inner
thoughts-with roars of me
all brain-all world
roaring-vibrating-I put
it down, swiftly, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into one second
of time-I'll be long
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robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City
(from Daydreams for Ginsberg)

Ha! Inner thoughts, with layers of roar—brain that!
Architectonic thoughts, striated, simultaneous, with
electrolysis—turn it up!
Fast Greek! Kero-stotle! Naked! Dancing in the Agora! Open
parentheses…
Reminds me of the “lecture” (the big one) about the Greeks,
back in college, Freshman year.
Old Prof stands, looks at hundreds of students, raises his
index finger, sez:
“What’s the first thing Aristotle did in the morning?”
No answer from the students.
“He hiked up his toga and took a piss!”
Students didn’t know if it was OK to laugh.
Kero-stotle, robed & long gold haired in the famous Greek
afternoon, takes a pee….
Thinks meantime, 1000 words (of pages) compressed into
one second.
Kero-stotle wants to go exceptionally fast.
He thinks time is running out.
Those guys over in Jersey invented the atom bomb.

All world, roaring.
Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 77

Don’t sit there, so weak minded.
Do the Whitman “thing”—go up on the tenement roof and
make barbaric noises.
Even Barbarians had points of view.
Write fast.
Drive faster.
Advantage over old Greeks: automobile.
Pounding, seething across Indiana, telephone poles lifting like
they’d been electroshocked.
Poetry has advantages over prose:
It extends your eyelashes.
More feeling, less bloat.
“How do you know you’re alive, Son?”
“Because zig zag lines of lightning pour along my arms,
officer.”
Even the Greeks would have had difficulty making sense of
Indiana.
Jack Kerouac. A better poet than he was a prose writer:

Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the
jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and PillsAll the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one MindPoor!
I wish I was free
of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.
Poor Jack Kerouac! The body is a prison. His. Ours. And even if
you didn’t think so, say, because you love your Ivory Soap,
the ten directions of space will finish you off just as surely as
the attacking dog-armies…Ach! What a mortal mess. What
meat bags we are! All of us. Soap only masks the inevitable.
Poor Jack! Gnashing everywhere in consciousness! No respite,
no matter where you look in creation! From virus to
supernova—everything is excreting from its bowels, what’s
an amateur Buddhist, ex-Catholic to do? Play his guitar of
course. His blue guitar. “I wish I was free/of that slaving meat
wheel/and safe in heaven dead.”
There’s no evidence that “safe” counts in Heaven—one must
fairly ask (as Alan Turing did) if consciousness can exist at tall
outside the body. You see? Kerouac can’t resist jumping from
Buddhism to Catholicism at thinned out edges of his poem.
I love him for that.
Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 79

I love that heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just like us.
Blues. Bravado. Wishes. A few lies. Some dreams. And he can
make you laugh or cry. All while taking dizzying steps.
Kerouac the poet, writes an elegy for Charley Parker:

241st Chorus
And how sweet a story it is
When you hear Charley Parker
tell it,
Either on records or at sessions,
Or at official bits in clubs,
Shots in the arm for the wallet,
Gleefully he Whistled the
perfect
horn
Anyhow, made no difference.
Charley Parker, forgive meForgive me for not answering your eyesFor not having made in indication
Of that which you can deviseCharley Parker, pray for mePray for me and everybody
In the Nirvanas of your brain
Where you hide, indulgent and huge,
No longer Charley Parker
But the secret unsayable name
That carries with it merit
Not to be measured from here
To up, down, east, or west-Charley Parker, lay the bane,
off me, and every body

Page 80 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Thank you Jack Kerouac. Thank you for writing ”Nirvanas of
your brain”—just the right gift for Charley Parker’s ghost
—“merit/Not to be measured from here”. Thank you Jack
Kerouac for finally answering Charley Parker’s eyes. Thank
you for writing a jazz prayer. Thank you for thinking of a horn
player as a secret, unsayable angel. Thank you for praying to
his spirit: “lay the bane,/off me, and every body”. Let us be
relieved, every one, from the terrors of addiction and money
and hungers. And thank you for the tenderness, Jack Kerouac.
Maybe it makes no difference but I’m not convinced and
neither were you. Thank you for not being convinced.
Oh and you were dirty and funny just like us, Jack:

Hitchhiker
Tryna get to sunny Californy' Boom. It's the awful raincoat
making me look like a selfdefeated self-murdering imaginary
gangster, an idiot in a rueful coat, how can they understand
my damp packs - my mud packs „Look John, a hitchhiker'
„He looks like he's got a gun underneath that I. R. A. coat'
'Look Fred, that man by the road' „Some sexfiend got in print
in 1938 in Sex Magazine' –
„You found his blue corpse in a greenshade edition, with axe
blots'
I’ve hitchhiked some. Blind. Walking dizzying steps of days
and nights in America’s liminal spaces, half in, half out of
culture, twisting by the side of the road. It’s a liberated
vagrancy.

Boom. They drive right past. “I wouldn’t want to ride with you

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 81

anyway…”
Jack, America, properly, at its best, was always shabby. (How
Lewis and Clark must have stank!)
Thank you for your Haikus:

the winter fly
has died of old age
**
Shall I break God's commandment?|
Little fly
Rubbing its back legs
**
My pipe unlit
beside the Diamond
Sutra - what to think?
**
Early morning yellow flowers,
thinking about
the drunkards of Mexico.
**
No telegram today
only more leaves
fell.
**
Nightfall,
boy smashing dandelions
with a stick.
**
Holding up my
purring cat to the moon
I sighed.
**
Drunk as a hoot owl,
writing letters
Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 83

by thunderstorm.
**
Empty baseball field
a robin
hops along the bench.
**
All day long
wearing a hat
that wasn't on my head.
**
Crossing the football field
coming home from work the lonely businessman.
**
After the shower
among the drenched roses
the bird thrashing in the bath.
**
Snap your finger
stop the world rain falls harder.
**
Nightfall,
too dark to read the page
too cold.
**
Following each other
my cats stop
when it thunders.
Page 84 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

**
Wash hung out
by moonlight
Friday night in May.
**
The bottoms of my shoes
are clean
from walking in the rain.
**
Glow worm
sleeping on this flower your light's on.
**
Thank you Jack Kerouac. For allowing your journeys to visit
me. For saying there is nothing to be astonished about; there
is everything to be astonished about.
For saying we can try out a hundred masks, then throw them
all away before the void.
For daring to be the schoolboy who delightedly writes and
rewrites misspelled word.
I like you better when you’re not in a car. You were a fine poet
who got lured into prose. I think the skyscrapers hurt you.
I like you better when you stand before your bathroom mirror.
I like you better when you express your feelings with a broken
pencil.
I am not sentimental. I am very sentimental. I’m not easy. I’m
very easy.
This morning I’m letting reality weigh itself. I’m very free.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 85

Transtromer
I lost a poet this morning for that’s how it feels: the death of
the writer is personal. In this case the poet is Tomas
Transtromer. I feel the loss of a friend. Perhaps I don’t
experience this with every poet. But when a lyric writer
crosses over there’s a stitch in my ribcage. With Tomas
Transtromer I always felt I had a secret friend. Those of us
who love poetry, who in small or large ways have endeavored
to live by it—that transitive and delicate approach to
phenomena we call “the imagination”—are heartened when a
writer suddenly says the world is still being born as
Transtromer does in his poem “The Half-Finished Heaven”:
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draft.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the Ice Age studios.
Everything begins to look aoun.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
Excerpt From: Tomas Tranströmer. “The Great Enigma: New
Collected Poems.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/WAORD.l
Page 86 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

**
In these times we must be reminded of the mysteries of
consciousness and water shining. Tomas Transtromer is a
good friend, a fellow introvert who has learned to live in the
big world, who’s endeavored to do some decent work with
damaged children, who came home at night in the Baltic dark
and played Haydn on his piano, who whispered in our ears,
each of us is still half open.
Imagine that.

Habitude
I walk with a stick and a dog, down river, up, no one can tell
me how its done. A few understand and sing as I pass—the
songs are fine—but there are turns in a stream where songs
fall apart, they’re only melody.
When I was a boy a stove abandoned and filled with crickets
was opera—blind kid, twilight blues, the moon coming on
blues, and so my first lesson. Later Auden would refine it: “the
roses really want to grow”.
Crickets sing a house—find homes—say something.
Oh but the walking blues, songs to poems, walking with a stick
and dog.
Michael Cuddihy: Each time breath draws through me,/ I know
it’s older than I am.
Basho: The journey itself is my home.
Levertov: I saw/ a leaf: I shall not betray you.
Hsieh Ling-Yun: Joy and sorrow pass, each by each,/ failure at
one moment, happy success the next./ But not for me. I have
chosen freedom/from the world's cares. I chose simplicity.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 87

Dog and stick, down river, up, a crescent moon, poems
remembered.
Rexroth: Water/ Flows around and over all/ Obstacles, always
seeking/ The lowest place./ Equal and/ Opposite, action and
reaction,/ An invisible light swarms/ Upward without effort.
Niels Bohr: Everything we call real is made of things that
cannot be regarded as real.
Jan Kaplinsi: The sea doesn't want to make waves./The wind
doesn't want to blow./Everything wants balance, peace,/and
seeking peace has no peace./If you understand this, does it/
change something? Can you be peaceful/even where there is
no peace?
Sam Hamill: I'd kiss a fish/and love a stone/and marry the
winter rain/if I could persuade this battered earth/to let me
make it home.
Kuusisto: I’m filled with tangled string. A look contains the
history of man. (Auden) Some days I’m grateful I can’t see
your faces. Mutual need. Mutual aid. Simple. But even
Anarchists are specious. I once introduced myself to Utah
Philips, said, in the manner of all young pepole: “Its a thrill to
meet another anarchist.” He glared at me. Said nothing. And
of course I couldn’t see his face. His anarchy had a small “a”.
Stick and dog…
Sam Hamill: Fish, bird, stone, there's something/I can't know,
but know the same:/I hear the rain inside me/only to look up/
into a bitter sun.
Sam Hamill: There are some to whom a place means nothing,/
for whom the lazy zeroes/
a goshawk carves across the sky/are nothing,/for whom a
home is something one can buy./
I have long wanted to say,/just once before I die,/I am home.

Page 88 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Sam Hamill: the poem is a mystery, no matter/ how well
crafted:/is a made thing/that embodies nature./And like Zen,/
the more we discuss it,/the further away..
Muriel Rukeyser:
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this
instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation
journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
Sam Hamill: Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry
transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of
power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an
eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain
contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages
Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 89

and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture,
returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds.
Robert Bly:
Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips
Porous to murder. It’s only the inattention
Of the prosecutors that lets us go to lunch.
Reading my old letters I notice a secret will.
It’s as if another person had planned my life.
Even in the dark, someone is hitching the horses.
That doesn’t mean I have done things well.
I have found so many ways to disgrace
Myself, and throw a dark cloth over my head.
Why is it our fault if we fall into desire?
The eel poking his head from his undersea cave
Entices the tiny soul falling out of Heaven.
So many invisible angels work to keep
Us from drowning; so many hands
reach Down to pull the swimmer from the water.
Even though the District Attorney keeps me
Well in mind, grace allows me sometimes
To slip into the Alhambra by night.
Kuusisto:
Life in Wartime
There are bodies that stay home and keep living.
Wisteria and Queen Anne’s lace
But women and children, too.
And countless men at gasoline stations.
Schoolteachers who resemble candles,
Boys with metabolisms geared to the future,
Musicians trying for moon effects.
The sky, which cannot expire, readies itself with clouds
Or a perfect blue
Or halos or the amoebic shapes
Page 90 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

Of things to come.
The railway weeds are filled with water.
How do living things carry particles
Of sacrifice? Why are gods talking in the corn?Enough to feel
the future underfoot
Someone is crying three houses down.
Many are gone or are going.
Paulo Freire:
Dominated and exploited in the capitalist system, the lower
classes need—at the same time that they engage in the
process of forming an intellectual discipline—to create a
social, civic, and political discipline, which is absolutely
essential to the democracy that goes beyond the pure
bourgeois and liberal democracy and that, finally, seeks to
conquer the injustice and the irresponsibility of capitalism.
Sam Hamill:
Do your homework. Stand for something. Define what you
stand for and live for it and be willing to die by it. It’s the
same advice I give a new poet, or for that matter, an old poet.
Or a young Buddhist.
Sam Hamill:
You know, poetry's job is to make us feel good. Poetry exists
to allow us to express our innermost feelings. There isn't one
role for poetry in society. There are many roles for poetry. I
wrote a poem to seduce my wife. I wrote a poem when I
asked her to marry me. Poetry got me laid. Poetry got me
married. I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon,
when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there
where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political
poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because
Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something
to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own
Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 91

poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because
most of us write from direct human experience in the world.
Auden:
Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justiceâ&#x20AC;Ś

Sam Hamill:
Black Marsh Eclogue
Although it is midsummer, the great blue heron
holds darkest winter in his hunched shoulders,
those blue-turning-gray clouds
rising over him like a storm from the Pacific.
He stands in the black marsh
more monument than bird, a wizened prophet
returned from a vanished mythology.
He watches the hearts of things
and does not move or speak. But when
at last he flies, his great wings
cover the darkening sky, and slowly,
as though praying, he lifts, almost motionless,
as he pushes the world away.
There are turns in a stream where songs fall apart, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re
only melody. But poetry pushes the world outward, then pulls
it inward, with blue-turning-gray clouds.
Kuusisto:
Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m walking in a yielding air beside my dog, do you
understand?
There are no faded hopes beside her, do you understand?
Page 92 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

She doesn’t care about my eyes.
She doesn’t care about the heroes on TV.
She lives without protective lies.
Look at us, we’re walking through pitch darkness.
Sam Hamill:
Poetry is one of the ten thousand paths to the Buddha;
through poetry (as various as that word may be), we may find
self-realization and do away with the “I-and-thou” and
competitive mind-set that makes war possible (as well as
poetry contests) and we come into a world of only “we,” weare-oneness” in our struggle in this sentient interdependent
world. To value life requires valuing the cosmos that makes
life possible. How can we actually learn what love is without
learning to fully love this earth on which we stand? —The
very dirt and stone of it. We must protect it from capitalism
just as we must protect those who suffer most from
organized oppression. We must love and resist and rebel.

NOTE: These pieces can also be found at Stephen
Kuusisto's blog, Planet of the Blind.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 93

About Nine Mile Press
Nine Mile Press is the book publishing arm of Nine Mile
Magazine (Ninemile.org) which also publishes the Nine
Mile Talk About Poetry blog and Soundcloud and iTunes
podcasts. The catalogue includes the former W.D.
Hoffstadt & Sons catalogue.
Current catalogue includes:
Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015). Of this poet Peter
Everwine has written, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work
has been priased by Noman Dubie, David St. John, and
Peter Campion.
Poems for Lorca, Walt Sheppperd (2012). The poems
continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and
record the life around him. Lorca is his daughter, and
the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from
father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and
community member to all of us.
Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014). A
reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an
extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the
poem and his thoughts about it.
Prior publications include the following, all out of print:
The Airplane Burial Ground, James Crenner (1976). Of this
book Marvin Bell wrote: “... the poet turns the pain of
loss into the presence of art.” Mr. Crenner was cofounder and co-editor of The Seneca Review.
Villains, William Burtis (1978). Mr. Burtis writes with an
honest and real sense of real life lived through that shines
through every poem here.
Dinosaurs, Herbert Scott (1978; chapbook). Mr. Scott

Page 94 - Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2015

writes this long poem from the ground up, with the
precisionist’s ear and the surgeon’s knife.
Screen Gems, John Bowie (1978). A posthumous book by a
brilliant and extraordinary poet, with memorial essays
and poems about Mr. Bowie by David St. John, Bob
Herz, Larry Levis, Bill Burtis and Debora Greger.
Some Time In The Winter, Michael Burkard (1978;
chapbook). A marvelous long poem, reflective and
inward.
The Passionate City, Barbara Moore (1979). Phillip Booth
wrote, “Barbara Moore’s poems are serious business;
they spare nothing… in sharing with us their knowledge
that we, too, are ‘made / Of grief and disparity and food
and love.’”
The Olive Grove, David St. John (1980) These poems give
us the brilliance one expects from David St. John:. They
are elegant, witty, comprehensive, praising.
The Year is Approaching Snow, James Cervantes (1981). A
great collection by this well-known and highly regarded
poet, essayist, critic, magazine editor, publisher,
anthology architect.
The Love & Death Boy, Roger Weingarten (1981). The
work includes poems by Mr. Weingarten and pictures of
sculpture by Dina Yellen.

Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 1 - Page 95

Listen at
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-

/

about-poetry id972411979?mt=2
Or at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz

Working poets talking about poems they love,
or are puzzed by, or are in some other way
engaged by. Completely unscripted, and
fascinating.